Microsoft moving Canadian headquarters into Toronto as it expands

Originally published September 11, 2018 at 4:49 pm

Microsoft is moving its Canadian headquarters to a downtown Toronto building near Lake Ontario. The silver towers in the center are CIBC Square; Microsoft will occupy four floors in the building on the far left. (Microsoft )

Microsoft is moving its Canadian headquarters to downtown Toronto and plans to add 500 jobs in the country in the next four years.

Share story

Microsoft is moving its Canadian headquarters from a suburb to the heart of Toronto, its most visible statement in what the company says will be a “massive” investment in the country.

The software company will soon inhabit 132,000 square feet of space at CIBC Square in downtown Toronto.

Currently, Microsoft’s Canadian headquarters is in Mississauga, a suburb just west of Toronto. The new headquarters will span four floors of the downtown building near Lake Ontario and open in 2020.

Microsoft plans to hire about 500 employees in the next four years across the country, adding to the 2,300 it already has in Canada, the company said Wednesday. Those employees are spread across the country from an engineering office in Vancouver, B.C., to an artificial intelligence research and development lab in Montreal, and a sales and engineering office in Toronto.

As part of its investment in the country, Microsoft will spend $570 million on office expansions, including the Toronto headquarters and new offices for its Vancouver sales team and Montreal lab.

Microsoft has about 650 employees in Vancouver now, most of whom work on technology development, including Hololens engineering.

“Increasingly, Canada is being recognized as a global leader in technology and the investments we are making today and into the future will help ensure Canada continues to be a hotbed of innovation,” Kevin Peesker, president of Microsoft Canada, said in a statement Tuesday.

Many tech companies have expanded in Canada in recent years in their search for ever more software developers, and especially as uncertainty over immigration has grown in the U.S.

Microsoft set up its Canadian headquarters in 1985 and its Vancouver engineering office in 2007.